Monthly Archives: April 2001

Economy Of Substance: What We Can and Can’t Measure.

This entry was posted in Health, Listener on by .

Listener 28 April, 2001.

Keywords: Health.

Some social sciences – demography, economics, geography and psychology – started off well because they had could measure the concepts they were dealing with. Others – anthropology, politics, sociology – have never been as successful. But that something cannot be measured does not mean it is unimportant. We cannot quantify culture and related behaviour and institutions. Yet they seem to be a key elements in economic performance. Contrariwise, well-constructed measures of economic performance, such as per capita GDP, may not be good indicators of our social objectives.

Two Economic Lieutenants

This entry was posted in Macroeconomics & Money, Political Economy & History on by .

Revised paper for The Stout Centre Research Centre conference on ‘Holyoake’s Lieutenants: 1960-1972′, 27-28 April, 2001. Parliament Buildings, published in Holyoake’s Lieutenants ed M. Clarke (Dunmore Press 2003)

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Political Economy & History;

The term of the second National Government, from 1960 to 1972, can be split into almost exactly equal economic phases, changing at the end of 1966, when almost coincidentally the Minister of Finance also changed. The second from March 1967, was Rob Muldoon, well enough known and important enough to have a conference of his own in due course. From December 1960 to February 1967 the finance and economics lieutenant had been Harry Lake, an almost shadowy figure in the politically histories of New Zealand.

Official Channels

This entry was posted in Governance, Listener, Regulation & Taxation on by .

Broadcasting will never be just another business, whoever’s in charge.

Listener 14 April, 2001.

Keywords Governance; Taxation & Regulation.

I leave readers to recall nostalgically events from the pictures and anecdotes of Pat Day’s Voice and Vision: A History of Broadcasting (and to add the story of Aunt Daisy and the chimp). This column is about the policy process which underpins it all. There was a minister of broadcasting, and he (they were all hes) and the cabinet made decisions which affected the broadcasting system, what we heard and saw, and our nation’s culture. But there was no ministry of broadcasting, which meant that each minister was faced by a series of conflicting interest groups, which had to be sorted out without any independent advice.